Category Archives: Hello Kitty

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A friend recently posted photographs of a Hello Kitty shrine on Facebook, and I thought, how ridiculous! Of course, it turns out there are more than one type of Hello Kitty shrine in the world. I have no idea why, but there are two more after the jump.

Great news for Hello Kitty fetishists! On October 22nd, Sanrio opened a new theme park at Tokyo’s entertainment hub, Odaiba, called Hello Kitty Kawaii Paradise. From the park map, it looks like there’s a theater, a gift shop, and a pancake corner… and giant dancing mascots. Its biggest clientele = Kitty fans from other parts of Asia, who are flocking the joint to get a glimpse of the one and only Venus Hello Kitty. (Venus, the goddess, is the namesake of the facility that houses the amusement park, called Venus Fort.)

Hollywood company Fillico has created a special edition Hello Kitty version of their ridiculously overpriced bottled water. For $500, you can choose from five different types of Hello Kitty water. Red = friendship, pink = cute, yellow = heartful, green = wish, lavender = sweet. I suppose it could be a cute gift or novelty item at a wedding if you were ridiculously rich and ridiculously ridiculous.

Hello Kitty isn’t always cute and innocent — sometimes, she decorates deadly weapons, including rifles and grenades. Some of these are real weapons, by the way, customized by gun-owners — sometimes they’re law enforcement personnel who want their wives to enjoy shooting with them. As the officer in this video says: Pink doesn’t make it any more deadly than black.

This is cute, not in the conventional pink frilly Hello Kitty way, but in a much more nerdy retro Hello Kitty way. You still have to like Hello Kitty to carry it around, but if you’ve been a closet fan and are more of a black-and-white type of person than a pink person, this could work for you.

After the parade in Japantown last weekend, I ran into Hello Kitty and My Melody on the street. I was about to go bonk Kitty in the head when this gang of Asian women ran up to her screaming and took this very exciting photo. I think it totally made their day.

I am also the founder of The Tofu Project, a boutique program that helps Japanese entrepreneurs and creators think deeper, tell better stories, and go out into the world in a much bigger way. We work with companies like Mixi, Japan Airlines, and Salesforce.com.

Sometimes I try to explain Japanese culture on CNN, BBC, CBC, WSJ, ABC (so many acronyms!) or in person at places like the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, ETech, and Ignite!